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chests, a jewelry box upside down on the carpet.
    A half-dozen paintings hung crookedly on the walls and two lay on the floor. Another quilt, this one apparently a wall hanging, had been pulled off the wall and left lying on the floor. Looking for a safe? The bath opened off to the right side and behind the bed. The medicine cabinet stood open, and squeeze bottles of lotion, tubes of antiseptic and toothpaste littered the countertop beneath it. No prescription medicine bottles.
    Junkies. They’d take everything, then throw away what they couldn’t use; or, try it and see what happened.
    A St. Paul investigator was squatting next to a wallet that was lying on a tile by the fireplace.
    “Anything?” Lucas asked.
    “Look at this,” the investigator said. “Not a dollar in the wallet. But they didn’t take the credit cards or the ATM cards or the ID.”
    “Couldn’t get the PINs if Bucher and Peebles were already dead,” Lucas said.
    The cop scratched his head. “Guess not. Just, you don’t see this every day. The cards not stolen.”
     
    L UCAS BROWSED THROUGH the second floor, nodding at cops, taking it in. One of the cops pointed him down the hall at Peebles’s apartment, a bedroom, a small living room with an older television, a bathroom with a shower and a cast-iron tub. Again, the medicine cabinet was open, with some of the contents knocked out; another quilt had been pulled off the wall.
    The other bedrooms showed paintings knocked to the floor, bed-covers disturbed.
    A door to a third floor stood open and Lucas took the stairs. Hotter up here; the air-conditioning was either turned off, or didn’t reach this far. Old-time servants’ quarters, storage rooms. One room was full of luggage, dozens of pieces dating back to the early part of the twentieth century, Lucas thought. Steamer trunks. A patina of dust covered the floor, and people had walked across it: Lucas found multiple footprints came and went, some in athletic shoes, others in plain-bottomed shoes.
    He browsed through the other rooms, and found a few more footprints, as well as stacks of old furniture, racks of clothing, rolls of carpet, shelves full of glassware, a few old typewriters, an antique TV with a screen that was nearly oval, cardboard boxes full of puzzles and children’s toys. A room full of framed paintings. A cork bulletin board with dozens of promotional pins and medallions from the St. Paul Winter Carnival. The dumbshits should have taken them, he thought; some of the pins were worth several hundred dollars.
    He was alone in the dust motes and silence and heat, wondered about the footprints, turned around, went back downstairs, and started hunting for his boss.
     
    O N THE first floor, he walked around the crime scene in the hallway and past another empty room, stopped, went back. This was the TV room, with a sixty-inch high-definition television set into one wall.
    Below it was a shelf for electronics, showing nothing but a bunch of gold cable ends. He was about to step out, when he saw a bright blue plastic square behind the half-open door of a closet. He stepped over, nudged the door farther open, found a bookcase set into the closet, the top shelves full of DVD movies, the bottom shelves holding a dozen video games. He recognized the latest version of Halo, an Xbox game. There was no Xbox near the TV, so it must have been taken with the rest of the electronics.
    Were the old ladies playing Halo? Or did this belong to the Lash kid?
    Smith went by, and Lucas called, “Hey, Johnny…have you been up on the third floor?”
    “No. I was told there wasn’t much there,” Smith said.
    “Who went up?” Lucas asked.
    “Clark Wain. You know Clark? Big pink bald guy?”
    “Yeah, thanks,” Lucas said. “When’re you talking to Peebles’s nephew?”
    “Soon. You want to sit in?”
    “Maybe. I noticed that all the electronics were taken, but there were a bunch of games and DVDs there that weren’t,” Lucas said. “That’s